• Explosions Part II (in which I disagree with myself)

My last post talked essentially about the importance of selling out, slightly tongue in cheek, but still solid advice.  This time I’m gonna throw all that out the window.

I recently picked up the must-read book If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland.  I recommend it to anyone who works creatively.  The main theme of the book is “everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.”  Which I completely agree with.  Interestingly she says the ones without anything to say are the ones to whom writing comes easily.  Because they just blurt out without investing anything into it.  Remember – if it’s hard, you’re probably doing it right!

Ueland says it better than I do, so lets jump right into her words:

“It is our nasty twentieth-century materialism that makes us feel: what is the use of writing, painting, etc., unless one has an audience or gets cash for it?  Socrates and the men of the Renaissance did so much because the rewards were intrinsic, i.e., the enlargement of the soul.“

“Yes we are all thoroughly materialistic about such things. ‘What’s the use?’ we say, of doing anything unless you make money or get applause? for when a man is dead, he is dead.’  Socrates and the Greeks decided that a man’s life should be devoted to ‘the tendance of the Soul’ (Soul included intelligence, imagination, spirit, understanding, personality) for the soul lived eternally, in all probability.”

“I think it is all right to work for money, to work to have things enjoyed by people, even very limited ones; but the mistake is to feel that the work, the effort, the search is not the important and the exciting thing.  One cannot strive to write a cheap, popular story without learning moe about cheapness.”

During his life, van Gough made a total of 109 dollars from all his paintings, yet his art transcends time because this is a man that believed “The world only concerns me in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it and out of gratitude want to leave some souvenir  in the shape of drawings or pictures – not made to please a certain tendency in art, but to express sincere human feeling.”

Ueland goes on to say that if you write with “real love and imagination and intelligence” you may very well become famous and make a ton of money, BUT “if nothing is ever published at all and you never make a cent, just the same it will be good that you have worked.”

The reason I made this a part two is that I love the contradiction of working in Hollywood, where everything is about money and fame, while trying to make honest, transparent art that reveals beauty.  I believe the two CAN co-exist (though they rarely do) and this is my goal.

• Explosions!

So I went to see Drive a month or so ago, the Ryan Gosling flick.  It’s no secret that I’m a massive fan of his and I thought the film was fantastic, one of my favs from the year so far (Top 3 – along with Moneyball & Harry Potter 7 part II).  But there’s a bit of a controversy surrounding it because a lot of people went into the film expecting to see Transporter 4 (are there really THREE of these???), and instead got a love story.

Personally, I thought it was very much an action film, but apparently the guy sitting behind me in the theater disagreed as he turned to his date and said “This movie should be called ‘Talk’”.

And last week I saw this:

(Courtesy joblo.com)

What you see in this chart is the number of explosions per Michael Bay movie alongside the amount of money each movie made.  More explosions = more money!

And it made me wonder.  Do people really just want to go to movies to see explosions?  Was the success of Transformers: Dark of the Moon due simply to special effects?  Would Drive have been more of a success if it had a couple more car chases in it?

But I don’t think it’s so much explosions exactly as much as it is delivering on the promise of the premise, whether that be thrills in an action movie or laughs in a comedy.  People go to the movies with a certain expectation.  Apparently a LOT of people want to see people drive fast, blow stuff up, and hear guitar solos.  And, as a writer, if you can deliver on that expectation, you will probably make a lot of money.

Now, I didn’t get into writing to (only) make money.  It’s my desire to tell stories that challenge people to live better lives.  And Drive did this for me, challenged me, reminded me that unconditional love is real and that life is short.  It reached me with a level of honesty that is unfortunately rare in film.

I think it’s safe to say that not one person was challenged to live a better life by watching Transformers: Dark of the Moon.   But a HELL of a lot of people saw it.

Whether you like it or not, when you work on the canvas of massive, explosion-laded movies, you have a larger audience to reach.  Is it possible to deliver on what the mass-audience wants and still challenge them?  Of course it is.  Does it happen very often?  Unfortunately, no.  But that’s where you, the writer comes in.  The producers & directors may only care about delivering a visually stimulating movie, but it’s your job to write a film that reaches through those explosions to challenge brains and touch hearts.

So my challenge is to all creatives (not just writers): how can you make art that reaches the widest audience possible that still challenges them in a unique and life-changing ways?

• Defining Yourself to Define Your Characters

When you think about your friends and family what pops into your mind?  Is it their clothes?  Their job?  Or is it the thousands of hours you’ve spent together where they’ve either gone out of their way for you… or didn’t.

For me, people are defined by four things:

1. How they treat other people.

2. Their dreams and passions.

3. Their environment (people, places, & things that surround them.)

4. Their career.

You may disagree with my order here, but it’s an important lesson to learn how other people see you.  To learn how to define yourself.  First and foremost, it’s how you treat others.  I think that’s pretty hard to argue, yet we spend an awful lot of time trying to define ourselves with the latter two.  As a professional writer, treating people with respect and love should be a higher priority for you than to be a great writer.

Now, apply that to the characters you write.  How often do we try to define our characters using career or environment?  Those are just facts, paper definitions.  They don’t tell you anything about a person.

I challenge you to attempt to write characters that are defined by their decisions, by the way they treat others, by what they do when faced with adversity.  This is how we get unique, well-defined characters.